


Is AO3 a Feminist Space?

by jgc_72200



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Feminism, Meta, Other, acafan, fandom is my fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-04-17
Packaged: 2019-11-17 16:45:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18102461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jgc_72200/pseuds/jgc_72200
Summary: I'm a grad student studying AO3. Here are my initial thoughts about AO3 in regards to cyberfeminism.





	1. Assignment 1: Introduction

I am a graduate student interested in studying fans and fanworks, and for my class on cyberfeminism I chose to investigate AO3 as a potential feminist space and/or a black feminist space.

I will not be using users’ creations in this class (that is, I won’t quote or even read any fanfics to use as evidence). I’m interested in the metrics and metadata of fanworks; these pieces of information are not identifiable. 

As of now, I have more questions than answers about AO3 and its potential feminism. Among them (and some are included below), I’m struggling with the relationship of content and context: Is it possible to tell the user population based on the content they generate? Do the genders, races, and sexualities of the characters tell us anything about their writers? Or of their readers? Do the genders, races, and sexualities of the characters attract writers/readers who share those identifiers?

Purpose of class:  
“This class will provide a theoretical and hands-on background for considering, using, and remaking space, race and community within feminist cybercultures.”

The Internet/Technology:  
Are we still in web 2.0? Have we moved onto web 3.0? If web 2.0 was marked by user-generated content and community development, then perhaps the Internet is no longer the same space as it was when AO3 was formed - web 3.0 is corporate, commercialized, and content is valued for its financial capabilities.

Feminism online:  
In some ways “cybercultures” are “countercultures,” and do not need to abide by [heteronormative] rules or roles. Just as countercultures work to upend rigid structures, cyberculture can work outside of physical culture and its structures as well. Again, I have more questions: Is online or cyberfeminism different than feminism? Is it a part of the third wave of feminism? Is it fourth wave? Fifth? I’m still working on my definition of cyberfeminism, but for now, I’m working off the premise that it is feminism that exists in digital worlds, which allows for new angles of practice.

As we discussed in class, the Internet (and even tech in general) can emphasize and amplify. Online, feminism (and misogyny) messages can be shared - Interestingly, this quick (nearly instantaneous) journey of information can result in the message being strengthened, as more people learn it, or dilute it, like a game of telephone. Online feminism may just be current feminism that has been extended or expanded.

Black feminism online:  
The intersection of race and gender, but also the importance of an inclusive and purposeful feminism. Not simply “popular feminism,” as described in Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered: a “corporate-friendly” feminism that doesn’t challenge, and in which “the presence of women is sufficient to call feminism into being” (Banet-Weiser, 12). In fact, she concludes that popular feminism is “white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and heterosexual” (13).

Why AO3:  
In a previous class, I described AO3 as “...noncommercial and intended to provide a safe haven for authors from legal repercussions and to encourage free speech. The queer feminist nature of AO3 extends beyond the rejection of capitalism and ownership. The very programming of the archive reflects the creators’ values: the ability of writers to choose their own labels in their own vocabulary or choosing not to label; choosing what to be flagged for warning to avoid triggering and also to avoid associating queerness with something that requires a warning; choosing to create affiliations and communities. These, in turn, are reflected in feminist and queer fanfics... Similarly, outside the rigid structures of the anti-sexuality, anti-queer, and anti-women places on the Internet, writers can develop pro-sexuality and pro-sexual, pro-queer, and pro-women narratives. By posting these fanfics on AO3, the writers both engage and expand the community, and also heighten the progressive aspects of their stories.” 

I’ve been aware of AO3 since it’s conception. While other sites with a focus on fandom and fan activities have disappeared (such as Geocities or Fanlib), faded into obscurity (such as MediaMiner), or have a reputation for being hostile spaces (such as Reddit or 4chan), AO3 has remained dedicated to its original purpose: an online “room of one’s own.” As far as I know, there haven’t been any corporate takeovers or even sponsorships, nor any major internal conflicts, and its continued presence and growth mark it as a success, despite still being in beta.

We’ve discussed in class how the Internet mimics or reflects the bigotries and cruelties found in the physical world. That idea can be taken a step further: sexism, racism, and homophobia is programmed, whether deliberately or not, into the structures of websites or the even the web as a whole. Oscar Gandy explores the relationship between classification and disparities in “Matrix Multiplication and Digital Divide, and states that “[t]he systems developed for the identification, classification, and evaluative assessment of users of networked information systems are used for one fundamental purpose - the enhancement of discriminatory choices regarding whose interests are to be met and whose needs are to be aside” (Gandy, 140). While he was examining behavior with a focus on marketing, I believe that that it applies to AO3: AO3’s system of identification and classification were designed in a way that is feminist - That is, without that discriminatory framework intended to segregate with intention to suppress. 

Another aspect of AO3 that I admire is that the original programming and ongoing maintenance of this big and popular website are the results of women coders. Misogynistic fanboy culture is everywhere online (Banet-Weisberg calls this “toxic geek masculinity” (Banet-Weiser, 131) - Gamergate, while now a few years in the past, comes to mind. AO3 is yet another piece of proof that women do belong in tech, women are good at tech, women do belong in fandom, and women are good at fan creations.

I’m still working through my ideas and the support of them, but in short, following are the reasons I believe that AO3 is a feminist space. However, I suspect that it falls short of being a black feminist space.

Is AO3 feminist:  
Yes, based on users:  
\- Space for communities to form  
\- Space for users to create their own areas/sections  
\- Space for non-capitalistic creation  
\- Space for sharing  
\- Inclusion of own vocabulary  
\- Users can self define (or not describe, if they don’t want to)  
\- No “assumed, neutral form - a youngwhiteheterosexualmale” (Beyer, 156)  
\- No monetary investment required  
\- Moderated by users  
Yes, based on content:  
\- Space for queer content  
\- The relationship tags  
\- The separation of queer relationships from explicit ratings  
\- The lack of emphasis on heterosexuality  
\- Space for women-centric content

Is AO3 black feminist:  
Is “no race” really neutral? Or does it default to white?  
Maybe, based on users  
\- For the same reasons as above  
\- But is that enough?  
Not so much, based on content:  
\- Content structured around gender and sexuality , but not race  
\- Users can include their own tags, but choosing race isn't required as sexuality is

As danah boyd suggests in her article “White Flight in Networked Publics?”, social network sites without an explicit racial identifier (ie, Facebook or MySpace rather than AsianAvenue or BlackPlanet) still have racial overtones. As boyd notes, however, MySpace/Facebook “too are organized by race” (211). So “no race” is not “race neutral,” at least for users of Facebook and MySpace in the mid to late aughts. With the relative demise of MySpace and the ubiquitous-ness of Facebook, this may be harder to assert. 

Moving forward:  
I hope to study some of the metrics that AO3 collects and posts. Again, these metadata are about content more than users, so it might prove difficult (if not impossible) to determine the feminism of the people here, but maybe proving the feminism of the site is feasible.

Potential resources:  
Hofmann, Melissa A. 2018. "Johnlock Meta and Authorial Intent in Sherlock Fandom: Affirmational or Transformational?" In "The Future of Fandom," special 10th anniversary issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1465. 

Flegel, M. and Roth, J. (2014), Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor. Journal of Popular Culture, 47: 1092-1108. http://doi:10.1111/jpcu.12198


	2. Assignment 2: Ethnographic Study

What is black feminism? Queer feminism?  
I discussed black feminism in the first assignment. One way to understand this term is as feminism that is inclusive. To that I’d like to add queer feminism. To me, “queer” here refers to more than a sexuality that isn’t heterosexual; rather “queer” includes a rejection of oppression based on sexuality and gender, as well as race and class. 

This feminism is more than “popular feminism.” As I mentioned in the first part of this assignment, I find Sarah Banet-Wesier’s definition of “popular feminism” helpful in today’s political and economic climate:

“Unlike classic liberal feminism whose raison d’etre was to pose an immanent critique of liberalism, revealing the gendered exclusions within liberal democracy’s proclamation of universal equality, particularly with respect to the law, institutional access, and the full incorporation of women into the public sphere, this new feminism seems perfectly in sync with the evolving neoliberal order. Neoliberal feminism, in other words, offers no critique - immanent or otherwise - of neoliberalism” (Banet-Wesier, 11-12)

I quoted this in the previous part as well, but I think it bears repeating: popular feminism is “white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and heterosexual” (13).

 **Is AO3 a black feminist space?**  
As I stated in the first section, I believe that AO3 is successful as feminist space, but perhaps not as a black or queer feminist space. To add onto my introduction, I’m going to go into more detail about:  
\- Why it was built  
Non-capitalistic/corporate support system and purpose  
For women, by women  
\- How it was built  
Inclusion of same-sex relationships/at the same level as non-same-sex  
Folksonomy  
Warnings allow for consent  
-How it’s used  
Tags by AO3 users  
Tags by me personally

 **Why it was built**  
Fanlore, the wiki run by AO3’s parent organization, summarizes the foundation of AO3:  
“The AO3 was first proposed in May 2007 by Astolat. Her post was one of many in LiveJournal fandom reacting to the commercial startup FanLib, which had tried to recruit some fanfic writers for its new fic archive. LiveJournal fandom was unimpressed by the company's desire to profit off of the popularity of fanfic, not to mention a sales pitch to get buy-in from copyright holders saying things like "All the FANLIB action takes place in a highly customized environment that YOU control" (see File:FanLib info.pdf). Astolat's post An Archive Of One's Own set out some guidelines for a fan-controlled archive in opposition to the dystopian future she saw in FanLib: no ads, no restrictions on content, and a commitment to fic as fair use. To realize this vision, the Organization for Transformative Works was created.

Fans had other (often long-standing) reasons for wanting to help build a new multifandom archive. Strikethrough happened a few weeks after astolat's initial post, driving home the point that it was not safe to rely on commercial entities to preserve fan culture. Around the same time, the Snarry archive Detention vanished literally overnight because of an argument between the owner and one of the mods. This raised awareness that a long-term archive would need to be run by an organization not subject to a single person's whims.” (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own)

As mentioned above, AO3 was specifically a response to the attempt of corporations to capitalize on fans’ creations. The interference of corporation would undoubtedly lead to censorship due to fanworks’ often queer and/or sexual content (more on this later); even without deliberate restriction, the temporary nature of many online communities endangered the preservation of content.

By working outside the corporations that own the intellectual properties (IPs) that fanworks are based on, AO3 is free from the approval or disapproval of the corporations. It functions outside of a capitalistic relationship with the corporations; i.e., it doesn’t need to be beholden to the corporations for support, nor does it need to pay them for the privilege of using the IPs. I use the word “free” purposefully here: there is no monetary exchange at all allowed on AO3. Accounts are free, it is staffed by volunteers, it is funded by donations, and there are no advertisements anywhere. By banning monetary exchange, AO3 also breaks fanworks out of monetary valuing. By this I mean that fanworks have a reason for existence completely outside of the concepts of capitalism. I believe that this disruption of capitalism is progressive, and possible to interpret as queer in that it dismantles what has become the typical structured relationship between creator and consumer. Rather than the audience paying for content or the writer being paid to create content, there is freedom in sharing - both in terms of consuming and creating. 

“Legitimacy, Validity, and Writing for Free: Fan Fiction, Gender, and the Limits of (Unpaid) Creative Labor” by Monica Flegel and Jenny Roth (The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 47, No. 6, 2014) explores this concept in much more detail. They state that they “are not arguing for a capitalist takeover of fan fiction” (Flegel, 1105) but conclude that authors of fanworks should be paid for their labor, obviously an opinion not shared by AO3 (or me for that matter). Their article is still a good summary and analysis of money and writing. 

Something I believe: a lot of transformative fandom is about shipping, that is, the relationship between characters. I think that this is one of the reasons (if not the main reason) that AO3 is built the way it is. 

**How it was built**  
In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, much of fandom was hosted on indiviual, fan-created websites or on small, fan-created archives. At that time, fanfiction began moving from private spaces (such as email groups) into public spaces (ie, websites that could be found by anyone). 

Here’s Fanlore’s explanation of content warnings:  
“While content warnings had long been used in fandom for fan-creations, the advent of the Internet and personal websites made them more common (see History of Warnings). Readers were warned about such topics as explicit violence, explicit sexual content, or specific types of sexual content; however, even non-graphic or even non-sexual warnings were sometimes placed on slash websites or stories (see Warnings Pages for Slash).” (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Warnings)

Anecdotally, following the practices in the fandom I was in, I had a warning splash page on the website I created circa 2000 despite the total lack sexual or violent content. It was a slash shrine, that is, a website for the relationship between two boys; the reason I included one was only due to the sexual orientation of the characters. 

This equation of queer relationships with explicit sexual content is an criticism, if not condemnation, of queerness. It also establishes non-same sex relationships (often called “het” in fandom) as the default, as normal. Queerness is different, deviant.

AO3’s upload form features a section on warnings, and this portion of the form is required to be filled out for the work to be posted.  
[](http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/)

Notably, relationships are not part of the warning, and thus queer relationships as well. By excluding queer relationships from this part of the form, AO3 deliberately removes queerness from something requiring a warning. 

A further point on the warning part of the form: again, as this is required of all stories posted, AO3 creates and maintains a safe space for readers. While of course people can use this section in bad faith, I believe it is still important to note that AO3 is designed around communication and consent: with a warning in place, readers can choose to engage or avoid the fanwork. This further encourages both responsible posting by the creator and responsible reading by the audience. This in turn creates a safe space (or has the potential to do so), at least within the confines of the fanwork.

Another required part of the form is the categories selection.  
[](http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/)

“Categories” in this case is used to refer to relationships. It is possible to choose multiple categories. Here queer pairings are included with along with heterosexuality on equal footing. However, it’s important to note that these are primarily gender-binary pairings; by that I mean that the relationships are both between two people, and that those two people are either M (male) or F (female). 

Relationships between any number of people over two are gathered under the “multi” category and relationships between people who don’t identify as M or F can use “other.” Here I believe that this method of categorizing relationships that can be vastly different from one another (that is, M/M/M vs. F/F/F/F, etc.; or gender nonconforming people vs. non-binary people) is restrictive.

Below these two sections are fields for character tags and relationship tags.  
[](http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/)

While these fields are optional, I believe that their inclusion is telling: besides knowing who the story is about, the next thing readers (or at least the readers that AO3 was built for) want to know is who pairs up with whom. Again gender and sexuality can come into play here.

Despite the different ways a story can include information about the characters, there are no places specifically for race to be mentioned, not like gender and sexuality can be. The third field of tags is a catch all “additional tags” where the creator can certainly include the race, ethnic, or cultural information about their characters. Again, “additional tags” is not specifically for this: tags that are found here include tropes, summaries, author thoughts, and additional content warnings.

 **The way it is used**  
[](http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/)

“The Browse: Tag” page displays the current most-popular “additional tags” in use. Perusing this tag cloud, as of March 2019 I don’t see any tags that reference race. There are specific tags relating to sexuality: “BDSM,” “bottoming,” threesome,” “fingerfucking;” to gender: “gender related,” “female characters,” and “female relationships;” and to sexual identity: “LGBTQ themes” and “boys’ love.” AO3 is not creating these tags - users are. The onus for creating and using tags is the users. I have questions about this, but unfortunately no real answers.  
\- Does that mean that the lack of race in this cloud is due completely to the users’ views on describing race?  
\- What are the races of the characters? Is it possible that most characters are white? And if that’s true, is white seen as default (and thus doesn’t need to be tagged)?

I wasn’t surprised by the amount of sexual content-related tags; in my experience, transformative fandom tends to be sex-positive. I believe this is another point in AO3’s favor for being feminist. (Destination Toast has some interesting stats on smut here on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16876383 and https://archiveofourown.org/works/16876518)

 **How it is used**  
Folksonomy, a taxonomy created by and for the folks, ensures that users’ words are part of the organization schema of the site. Rather than a structure created top-down and rigid, a folksonomy can be adopted and adapted by the users themselves. Anyone can create an “additional tag.” Behind the scenes, volunteers can match terms and words to previously created tags, which ensures that spelling is correct and consistent; this moderation prevents the tags from being a wild west of chaos and it protects users from trolls. 

I spent some time combing through “additional tags” in an attempt to compare sexuality, gender, and race. This was a difficult exercise for me and I want to preface this part with the caveat that my methods and results are hardly scientific. For one, due to time constraints I could only dedicate a few nights to compiling terms. Furthermore, the terms that I searched for were dependent on what I thought up and/or saw in tags, and therefore it’s entirely likely that I missed terms. There’s also the issue of fandom-specific tags re: identity; it would be very difficult for a single researcher to peruse every fandom on AO3 to pick out the terms unique to that subset.

Total stories on AO3: 4,678,224 (the result I got when I submitted a blank search form)  
“Additional tags” referencing race  
\- Asian characters: 1828  
\- Bisexual Male Character of Color: wasn’t yet “wrangled” by volunteers, so no number was available  
\- Bisexual female character of color: 244  
\- Black characters: 916  
\- Characters of color: 8910  
\- Canon character of color: 1724  
\- Female character of color: 3312  
\- POV character of color: 991  
“Additional tags” referencing sexual identity (minus the ones mentioned above)  
\- Agender character: 1762  
\- Bisexual character: 21,039  
\- Bisexual male character: 10,207  
\- Bisexual female character: 3336  
\- Gay male character: 9740  
\- Lesbian character: 8906  
“Additional tags” referencing gender identity (again, minus the ones mentioned above)  
\- Female protagonist: 2270  
\- Male protagonist: 339  
\- Nonbinary character: 9785  
\- Trans male character: 12,261  
\- Trans female character: 4325

Category (again, this is required)  
\- M/M: 2,253,538  
\- F/M: 1,140,377  
\- F/F: 383,085

After pulling these numbers, I tried to compare the “additional tags” for race, sexuality, and gender to see if people were tagging race consistently fewer times than gender/sexuality. However, I think it might be a case of apples to oranges. Similarly, I don’t think comparing the “additional tags” to the categories is fair, as category is a required field. Some people simply don’t use tags or use very few of them and since they aren’t required, their fanworks can be posted with nothing in that field (I’ll go into this a little more below). I'd still like to point out the massive difference in numbers between the categories and tags; for example M/M category and the tag "gay male character" or "bisexual male character." Even with those two tags combined, they don't come close to the number of fanworks in the M/M category.

 **How it is used by me**  
This investigation of AO3 pulls from an ethnological tradition. (Dictionary.com defines ethnology as “a branch of anthropology that analyzes cultures, especially in regard to their historical development and the similarities and dissimilarities between them” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ethnology.) The follow section is auto-ethnological; that is, I analyze my own place in this community. 

And so, my background is important to mention to frame this “study;” my experiences on the Internet and in fandom on the Internet are certainly not universal, but rather a product of this very specific background. I am a middle-aged, white, cissexual, educated woman with a white-collar job. Married to a man, I identify as bisexual. These features are important in understanding my biases. 

Additionally, their exclusion from my AO3 account (which has no image of me, nor any way to easily track down the “physical me”) is a privilege that an online avatar in an online community has over the “physical me.” A little more on avatars follows below. I joined AO3 in 2009 when it opened to users; I have been in fandom in general since the late 1990s, when my family got access to the Internet. In the spirit of transparency, I believe I should also disclose that I make regular donations to AO3’s parent organization. In short, I am an enthusiastic user and supporter of AO3.

Re: “avatars”: A quick look into the “jgc_72200” account shows that it has only posted this work. I deliberately created a new account for my class and for this investigation; I wanted to keep my academic identity and my fandom identity separate. This “never the two shall meet” philosophy protects my fandom identity from the potential probing by my classmates, but it also serves to keep my fandom persona free of the baggage that my physical form drags with it. On AO3, I can be “fanfic author, and that alone. In Beth Coleman’s “Hello Avatar,” she explains that “[a]vatars play a critical role in the next levels of simulation and networks, as they are our messengers, the front line of interaction” (Coleman, 71). In this case, my fandom AO3 account limits me as messenger to only fandom topics and also limits the messages themselves to fandom.

My fandom account on AO3 has a unique and meaningful name. It also has an image that functions as a visual avatar. Coleman discusses avatar identity, noting that human avatars online are subject to the same or similar treatment that physical people/bodies endure (72). My AO3 avatar is not me; again, I prefer that the AO3-me is sequestered from the physical-me. Again, in some ways, it frees me. This jgc_72200 has no user picture; I don’t need this account to represent much of me. It’s possible that if I spent more time crafting an AO3 identity around jgc_72200, this fanwork could connect with/to more people as it wouldn't be as “faceless.” The account Destination Toast is used to post fan-studies as well, so it is possible to establish an identity around analysis of fandom (and AO3 in particular).

Since 2009, I have posted 49 pieces of fanfiction under my fandom account. I created a spreadsheet to track what AO3 categories and “additional tags” I used and to place them in groups, and to compare them to categories and tagging as a whole on AO3.  
Total: 49 stories  
Categories  
\- Gen: 21  
\- M/M: 15  
\- F/M: 14  
\- F/F: 4  
\- Multi: 1  
\- Other: 1  
Race of the characters  
\- Fanworks with at least 1 character of color: 20  
\- Fanworks with at least 1 white character: 45

I noticed that in general, my “additional tag” tagging tends to be rather sparse. This is especially true for earlier fics, possibly because at the time of posting those fanworks, which was 2009, the tagging system wasn’t as robust as it is now. Also, it’s possible that “additional tag” tagging hadn’t been as codified in general as it is now. I haven’t added tags in those early fanworks; thus even if a story had a queer or non-white character that I would now note in the “additional tags,” those early fanworks won’t feature that tag.

Sexuality in my “additional tags”  
I rarely include the characters’ sexual identities in the “additional tags” (i.e., “Bisexual,” “gay character,” etc.). Before listing out my “additional tags,” I thought that I never used sexual identity tags, and frankly was surprised to find that this was not the case; since that information is in the category section, I’ve generally considered tagging for that to be redundant. However I have used a few:  
\- Femslash  
\- Canon Lesbian Character  
\- Het (I did this years ago (2010) and don’t do it now)  
\- Slash (again 2010)  
\- Boys kissing (however, I consider this to be more of an action than a sexuality)

Gender in my “additional tags”  
\- BAMF women  
\- POV female character  
\- Original male characters  
\- Female character of color  
\- Male [character] (for when the gender of the character can be chosen)  
\- Female [character] (ditto)  
And then references to gender in a more general sense:  
\- Women being awesome  
\- Bechdal test pass  
\- Female friendship  
\- Male friendship  
\- Boys kissing (again, I think this is more of an action than a sexuality)

Race in my “additional tags”  
Like my habits with sexuality-related “additional tags,” I generally only tag for race when the character’s race is important to the fanwork or to the fandom.  
\- Female character of color  
\- Character of color  
In a recent fanwork featuring two male characters, one of whom is a male character of color, the only “additional tag” that I used to reference to the characters’ gender/race/sexuality was “boys kissing.”

When I post, the “additional tags” are used like subject headings are in book cataloging: they should inform the reader of a theme, trope, or purpose of the work. So for instance, in that recent story mentioned above, I didn’t tag it with “male character of color” because in my opinion, a reader interested in the experiences or perspectives of a male character of color would not find those in the fic. I want to again point out that my identity as a white person affects this decision (that I should tag for race only when it appears as a subject in the fic). Again, I want to highlight my privilege as a white woman and my ignorance of how people of color use the tags.

There is a huge variation in how many “additional tags” people use. In my recently uploaded fanfic, I used 7 tags. In comparison, here’s a screenshot of a fanwork that popped up repeatedly as I was doing research in AO3. I didn’t count the “additional tags” because there were so many - This isn’t even half of the tags for the fic. I’d also like to note that this particular fic was only 709 words and had a long author’s note in the beginning.

[ ](http://www.freeimagehosting.net/commercial-photography/)

Whether these tags were applied appropriately or not isn’t my point. Rather, I think this is a good illustration of the vastly different expectations or intentions of the tags.

Should I add more tags to the “additional tags” of old fanworks? Should I highlight the characters’ race, gender, and sexual orientations? By doing so, am I implicitly creating a more inclusive environment? It would give race, gender, and orientation equal value to the subjects of the fanworks.

 **Conclusion, such as it is**  
As I expected, I believe that AO3 is feminist in its rejection of capitalistic exchange between creator and consumer, its volunteer-created and -maintained structures, its inclusion of queer relationships, its focus on consent, and its sex-positive content. However, I don’t think that it’s specifically a black feminist space.

AO3 seems to be built around gender and sexuality, as the pairing category is a required portion of the submission form. Race is not directly addressed on the form, and while users can and do create “additional tags,” which include race identity-related tags, they don’t seem to exist or be used to the same degree as the category or even sexuality-related “additional tags.”

It would be interesting to survey people of color who use the site, either as writers or readers, to see how they use AO3. Again, I’m a white woman and my opinions aren’t particularly useful here. Adding race as a required category would move that into the forefront, just as AO3 did with sexuality. It is possible that problems might arise with the inclusion of race as a required category. As there are far more race and ethnic identities than gender or sexual (even if AO3 included more of those, as well), the sheer number of options could be complicated to code and organize. I also wonder what category to use when a character is not white, but also without an evident race. Related to that, how would one categorize a non-white character who isn’t from earth and thus doesn’t have a real-life racial identity? Again, as a white woman, I don’t think I should have the ability to answer those questions. 

I am leaning heavily toward re-tagging my fanworks to include the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the characters, even when those identities aren’t addresses in the fanwork.

With everything that AO3 offers, I believe it’s a tool as much as a site. In her book Out in the Country, Mary Green describes identity in a way that resonated with me: “[p]erformances of identities require tools” (Gray, 14). The idea of identity as actions is continued a few pages later as she defines identity is “work shared among many rather than the play of any one individual” and that “the assembly and articulation of one’s sense of self is… ‘work [that] always occurs in contexts’” (Gray, 21). With user images and profiles, and of course the compilation of fanworks under the author’s account, AO3 allows its users to assemble and articulate themselves in a relatively safe communal setting. Through the writings of other authors and through my own pieces, I’m able to explore my own identity (or even identities); AO3 gives me the space and the tools to do so.


	3. Assignment 3: Communication

I'm planning on reaching out to AO3 staff to ask them some of the questions that occurred to me over these assignments. I'm particularly interested in:  
\- Why was race not included as a required field?   
\- Why are the categories restricted to pairings?

I'd also love to get other people's thoughts on these subjects or anything related to queer identities. Or anything really!


	4. Assignment 4

Is AO3 a black feminist space?  
As stated in the early portions of this assignment, I believe that while AO3 is a feminist space, it isn’t inclusive enough for me to consider it a black feminist space. Additionally, while in some ways AO3 is distinctly queer, its limited pairing tags do not capture the true scope of queer relationships. 

In the previous section, I included screenshots of the metadata fields that authors must or can fill out to describe their work. Some fields are required, others optional, and “additional tags” is a catch-all that allows the author to include much more than character or plot information.

I sent a message through the help form to AO3, asking about the exclusion of characters’ race from the fields for character identification. I haven’t heard back yet and can only make assumptions based on my experiences in fandom and specifically with fanfic: readers like me are interested in the relationship between two characters, with a particular desire to find and save stories between same-sex characters, since historically those stories were excluded, censored, or hidden from fanfic collections (and fanfics themselves were as a whole considered controversial).

Black feminist x-reality  
In Hello Avatar, Beth Coleman describes x-reality as the mutual construction of the digital avatar(s) and one’s “real life” identity. The “augmentation” of identity is an important concept here as well: technology can allow for the amplification or extension of identity so that identity stretches beyond a physical border.

A black feminist x-reality melds together feminist ideals with the “real” world thanks to that extension that tech allows. 

Creating a black feminist x-reality  
To create a black feminist x-reality, I decided to take aspects of AO3 that I consider feminist and apply them to aspects of my physical world. My husband and I chose books from our shelves to try to “tag.” The tagging system is remarkable and again, as folksonomy that’s moderated by the users and is often used to bring attention to sex-positive story tropes, something that I believe is queer feminist in and of itself.

My first step in bringing AO3 into the physical world was to make the content of the website visible to us. As the TV is one of the bigger pieces of furniture, centered in the room, and the other pieces of furniture placed deliberately around it, having AO3 displayed on that ensured that the site was the focal point both in the room and of our attention. One of our computers is almost always hooked up to the TV, so it was easy to get online and to the website. I’m often logged into AO3, so when I pulled up the site, it was under my account. Once on AO3, I went to the page with the tag cloud so we could see the most commonly used tags. In this way I was again referencing Coleman: having my account on the screen was something like Lessig and his avatar appearing at once at the Austin Second Life party (Coleman, 12).

The books we selected were all fiction and were those with main characters with whom we were familiar enough to be able to tag their identities. Other than that, they were chosen at random. We also put in a few “additional tags” for tropes, themes, and warnings that we would find helpful if we were trying to choose a book to read. I put the year of publication for context.

Once we had AO3’s tag cloud and our books, we worked together to tag our physical books with the online, crowd-created vocabulary. I tracked our changes in a spreadsheet and below are our results:

The Truth by Terry Pratchett (2000)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: unspecified race, fantasy-setting race  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: humor, fantasy, no sex, vampires, fantasy monsters, happy ending

Mass Effect Andromeda: Annihilation by Catherynne Valente (2018)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: unspecified race, fantasy-setting race  
Sexuality: not specified  
Additional tags: aliens, no sex, happy ending

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: white character(s), character(s) of color, american character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s), gay character(s)  
Additional tags: mystery, slurs, period racism, period sexism, period homophobia, non explicit sex, murder, death

Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen (1991)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: white character(s), character(s) of color, hispanic character(s), black character(s), african american character(s), american character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: humor, environmentalism, non explicit sex, death

Nemesis by Agatha Christie (1971)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: white character(s), british character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: rape victim blaming, murder, no sex, mystery, period sexism, rape mention, death

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: white character(s), character(s) of color, turkish character(s), romanian character(s), british character(s), american character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: non explicit sex, non graphic violence, vampires, death

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1901-1902)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s)  
Race: white character(s), british character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: mystery, implicit rape mention, no sex, murder, death

Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte (1847)  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s)  
Race: white character(s), british character(s)  
Sexuality: heterosexual character(s)  
Additional tags: mental abuse, physical abuse, no sex, gothic, death

By doing this together, we mimicked the way that AO3’s tags and tag wranglers work; i.e., in a community. We talked through the tag choices, debating which characters were the main characters (and therefore worthy of being tagged) and what constituted “explicit” or “graphic.” We also referenced the tag cloud for ideas of tags to use on our books.

Tagging books with terms from a folksonomy would allow the vernacular of the readers to organize books, rather than publishers, marketers, or book sellers who may be segregated from the text (or at least have a difference sense of the book than I might as a reader). It also provides me with the opportunity to flag for myself the key points, themes, characters, or warnings. My words, my ideas, my interpretations become as valuable as those applied by the publishing companies.

Comparing our books’ tags with those in the tag cloud shows that there was little crossover in the two. Popular fanfic, it seems, isn’t as concerned with tagging genre descriptions (e.g. “mystery”), and instead the tag cloud is full of tags relating to sex. However, our books’ tags and AO3’s tag cloud both include warnings. 

I think this is particularly interesting - and important - when dealing with problematic texts, such as Agatha Christie’s Nemesis. Upon a recent re-read, I discovered that Christie has two screeds against women and what she considered to be fake rape accusations. In both cases those screeds had very little to do with the story and were clearly the author’s (rather than just the characters’) opinion. There was no indication that I’d find such blatant misogyny in the story by either the publishers or booksellers. If I could tag it and share my tags, I could flag for other readers what the publisher/booksellers neglected to warn me about.

As mentioned above, this exercise also allowed me to augment my physical identity with aspects of my online identity/avatar. Specifically, through matching physical books with the online tagging system, I melded my librarian identity with part of my AO3 identity, in this case taking an online activity into the physical world. This combination also works in the opposite direction (that is, taking a physical activity into the online world) since I primarily use (online) tags like subject headings due to my (“real life”) education as a librarian. And so this was yet another reflection, back into the “real world.” 

Finally, I found it interesting - and depressing - how white and straight the books we selected are. Although I consider myself a voracious reader and book collector, my library appears to skew toward white heteronormativity. 

So how can AO3 work on being more inclusive?  
My recommendation to encourage a more inclusive space is to divide the “additional tags” section up so that character identity has a more prominent place on the form. As the field works now, “additional tags” is used for a variety of reasons, such as to describe plot points/tropes, to describe characters, to talk to readers, to attract readers to the story, and as disclaimers. If this field was divided into spaces that were deliberately and specifically for characters’ racial identity, AO3 would be placing race on a equal platform as the gender and sexuality fields. 

In the previous section, I did a quick survey of my own fanworks on this archive. Inspired by my x-reality project, I decided to replicate the experiment of tagging (or in this case, re-tagging) my fics. I deliberated tried being more inclusive in terms of the tags I used for characters’ identities and to see how my tags would change if I applied the above suggestion on ten stories picked at random. 

To protect my privacy, I’m going to refer to my fanworks as “1,” “2,” “3,” etc.; again, for context, I’ll also include the year the fanwork was first posted. 

1 (2019)  
Current tags relating to character identity: (none)  
New tags:  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: black character(s), character(s) of color, african american character(s), white character(s), american character(s)  
Sexuality: bisexual character(s), lesbian character(s)

2 (2019)  
Current tags relating to character identity: boys kissing  
New tags:  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s)  
Race: black character(s), character(s) of color, african american character(s), white character(s), american character(s)  
Sexuality: bisexual character(s)

3 (2019)  
Current tags relating to character identity: male [character]  
New tags:  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: character(s) of color, hispanic character(s), italian-american character(s), white character(s), american character(s)  
Sexuality: bisexual character(s), gay character(s), heterosexual character(s)

4 (2015)  
Current tags relating to character identity: women being awesome, bechdel test pass, female friendships  
New tags:  
Gender: cisgendered male character(s), cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: white character(s), character(s) of color, black character(s), african american character(s), aboriginal australian character(s)  
Sexuality: bisexual character(s), gay character(s), heterosexual character(s), lesbian character(s)

5 (2013)  
Current tags: canon lesbian character(s), BAMF women, femslash, female-centric, POV female character  
New tags:  
Gender: cisgendered female character(s)  
Race: unspecified race, fantasy-setting race  
Sexuality: bisexual character(s), lesbian character(s)

Just like with our experiment tagging our books, re-tagging my stories increased their descriptors by a huge amount. It also showed me that while my writing appears to be more inclusive than the books on our shelves, I should write fic with gender-fluid characters, trans women characters, trans men characters, and agender characters.


End file.
